On a recent coaching call, one of our school owners \u2014 working the schools in his territory hard, doing everything he thought he was supposed to do \u2014 described his approach: send an email, wait, send another email a week or two later, wait again. He was getting nothing back and starting to wonder if the schools in his area just weren\u2019t going to work with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Greg Moody stopped him right there. \u201cI would never have the expectation that two or three emails is going to get them to respond.\u201d Not because the emails were bad. Because two or three emails, by themselves, was never going to be enough \u2014 not for a principal, not for a PTA president, not for anybody making a decision on behalf of an institution. There\u2019s a number every school owner should write down: seven. It\u2019s the average number of times a person needs to be asked before they say yes to something. Not because they\u2019re playing hard to get. Because they\u2019re busy, they\u2019re buried in requests, and it is always easier for a busy person to ignore you than to say no to your face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here\u2019s the reframe that changes everything: when a school goes quiet, most owners assume the school considered the offer and passed. That\u2019s almost never what happened. What actually happened is closer to what you experience on your own end \u2014 somebody walks in wanting to sell you advertising, and you say \u201cno,\u201d or more likely you just don\u2019t respond at all, not because you gave it careful thought, but because you\u2019re in the middle of fifteen other things. A principal facing a stack of vendor pitches, a plate of school-year logistics, and forty unread emails isn\u2019t rejecting you. She hasn\u2019t gotten to you yet, and she never will unless you show up again. And again. Up to seven times, on average, before the answer changes from silence to a conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is exactly why the timeline matters more than the tactic. If you\u2019re starting your outreach a month before school begins, hoping for a meeting with the PTA president or the principal before the first bell rings, you\u2019re not giving the seven-touch process room to work. Start as early as you possibly can \u2014 ideally while summer is still in front of you \u2014 because the schools that land a real relationship aren\u2019t the ones with the cleverest single email. They\u2019re the ones who were still showing up in week six.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The seven touches aren\u2019t seven identical emails. They\u2019re layered across different channels, because each one does something the others can\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Email<\/strong> is your first layer, and you should use it more than you think you should \u2014 at least one or two a week to every contact at the school, from now until the first day back. It\u2019s free, it\u2019s fast, and you can send it to an entire territory at once. But treat it as exposure, not persuasion. Its job is to get your name in front of someone repeatedly, not to close anything on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Direct mail<\/strong> is your second layer, and it works precisely because almost nobody else still does it. A number-ten envelope, hand-addressed \u2014 not a mailing label, an actual hand \u2014 to the principal, the assistant principal, the PE teacher, and the PTA president, individually. If you\u2019ve built any kind of book, testimonial collection, or program overview, this is where it goes, and it doesn\u2019t have to be modest. One version of this that works well: a thick package of parent testimonials \u2014 genuinely an inch of them if you have that many \u2014 a cover letter, and something physical and specific to that recipient, shipped in a box rather than a flat envelope. It should feel like it came from a serious, established organization, because it did. If you already have a relationship with a school, don\u2019t ease up on this layer \u2014 send more, not less. The instinct to coast once you\u2019re \u201cin\u201d is exactly how relationships go stale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n